Monday, April 23, 2007

Big Kitty, Shiny Fruit and the Ugly Bus

Promises, promises... I always keep my promises. Unless I forget them. Due to the old and feeble. Y'all know.

So let’s start with Darlin’ Kelley, my IRL girl.

Thursday night, she had a meeting after work. Seems her company, which merged with another last year, is facing layoffs (or “restructuring,” as they so gently put it). After the meeting, she called to see if I wanted to grab a drink and help alleviate stress.

When she picked me up, she told me The Boy had been hanging out outside when she left (did I mention they live in the same apartment building?) and gave her a big dose of sullen and sulky (keep in mind this is after they started talking again post Great Silence of 2007, but prior to Friday Night's Lights Out):

“Hey, what’s going on,” said Kelley.

“Nothin’.”

“Got plans for the evening?”

“No.”

“Going out this weekend?”

“Probably not.”

“Well, good luck with that, then.”

And all week, her boyfriend has been out of town. It’s a pretty common occurrence. She thought she’d cheer herself (and, hopefully, Boyfriend) up by sending him dirty little text messages.

Which he never answered.

But he managed to call Thursday afternoon to say he was landing back in Denver and would she be home for an hour or two so he could (I’m interpolating here) tap some of that hot Kelley ass. Booty call on a chica who’s at her wit’s end with everything (including her Hello Kitty underwear) and whom you have ignored for a week through messages steamy and personal…

Boyfriend, your timing sucked.

“Fuck ‘im,” said Kelley, and she only meant it figuratively.

This is the mood that catapulted the comedy that is the subject of this post.

Picture thus:

We’re sitting at Favourite Bar and she’s getting wound up. You know the kind of wound up where you’re talking really fast and you start repeating yourself?

“My fucking job. I hate my fucking job and my fucking boss and I felt fat all week and fucking The Boy and my fucking job and my fucking boyfriend and I’m fat and my fucking boss and fucking Boy…”

*pause*

Gloomy stare into depths of drink.

“I put my Hello Kitty underwear on yesterday… the ones I got at Target? I looked in the mirror and said, ‘Damn! That’s a big kitty!'”

If she’d been trying to be funny, it would’ve been funny. Because she was so glum, it was hysterical. When I snorted my Grey Goose Pear out my nose, she cracked up. “Big Kitty” is one of our favourite phrases now.

[SUMMARY: It’s not *exactly* schadenfreude. She laughed too.]

Well, that and “Shiny Fruit.”

Allow me to explain (oh, please, AntiM?)

A laundromat Kelley patronises was set upon by a pervert recently. According to the nice, little old Asian lady who runs the place, a guy came in several days running, asking to use the bathroom. When they’d go to clean the mens’ room later,** they’d find produce in the trash. Two or three pieces of produce notably phallic in shape. Produce that was suspiciously shiny.

So one day, Banana Boy comes in per usual and calls from the bathroom that there’s no toilet paper. Nice little old Asian lady brings some to him, and when she opens the door, he’s stark naked. And maybe happy to see her. Or maybe just doing his fine, upstanding banana impression.

It’s all alleged until the jury comes back with the verdict.

She called the police and he was arrested.** It turned out he was doing this at a salon right down the street from the laundromat too.

The bathroom at Favourite Bar is a single. No stalls. Lots of waiting. Kelly waited for… well, it seemed 20 minutes or so for a woman to come out.

“What do you think they do in there for all that time?” I asked.

“Maybe somebody delivered a basket of shiny fruit,” she grumbled.

Had I been drinking Grey Goose Pear, I would have shot Grey Goose Pear out of my nose. Again.

Now every time the bathroom is occupied for too long, we look at each other and say, “shiny fruit.”

[SUMMARY: Vaseline and bananas is *always* funny. Unless someone’s combining them in the bathroom of your favourite laundromat.]

Part of her Thursday anti-Boyfriend routine was checking out every guy in the bar and restaurant and rendering an opinion. Mostly favourable. And mostly pretty critical of the girls they were with. It sounded a little like the “my fucking job” rant from above:

“He’s cute, I’d do him and awww that one’s hot and I like a guy built like that you know and what the hell is up with her nose and that guy came in a couple of weeks ago and I had to look again and say whoa and that girl is some kind of homely isn’t she and that guy’s good come to Kelley who let the Ugly Bus off here...?”

Not as funny as Big Kitty, but rounded out the night with three phrases (‘cause three is a nice grouping, dontcha know?).

Sunday, I had a baby shower to attend and I took the Stupid Blanket. I also gifted the parents-to-be with the half-finished Big Baby (it’s there, a few posts back. I’ll post a picture when it’s done) and wrote on the card, “Now give it back to me so I can finish it.”

Seth, a seven-year-old boy who informed me he knows how to sew too, wanted to learn to knit. Big Baby is a basic feather-and-fan pattern with a couple of rows of knuthin’ but knittin’ in every pattern repeat, so I got to one of those and let him take a crack at it.

He got the hang of it fast, and pretty soon wanted to trade so he could work on the Stupid Blanket (he termed it, “Maybe I could help you out with that one now.”), which is a linen stitch. Not difficult, but an added complication over the knitting he was used to. I figured, what the heck. Anything gets tangled up, I can untangle it later.

After about six repeats of the linen stitch pattern, he had it down. He kept switching back and forth, proclaiming knitting, “pretty easy,” and “more fun that sewing.”

When it was time to go, he didn’t want to. His first suggestion was that I just let him take one or the other of the blankets home with him and he could practise on that, maybe even finish it up for me. I declined and his mother, trying to PLEASE get him to leave (“People are waiting in the car, Seth.”) told him they could find him some knitting lessons. He continued to knit on Big Baby.

“Seth! Come on now!”

“I’m almost done! I only have four stitches left! Just let me finish this row!”

The mom-to-be said, wonder and a little dismay in her voice, “It’s like crack!”

“And the two of you have just uttered two of the top ten knitters’ phrases," said I. "1) It’s like fuzzy crack, and 2) just one more row!"

She laughed and I marked the row Seth knit (since he knit a whole row all by himself) so when I give the blanket to the parents-to-be, she can see just which row he knit for her.

[SUMMARY: Maybe I *can* teach knitting to people. Or maybe Seth is just patient enough to withstand my knitting instruction.]

I was sorely tempted to send Stupid Blanket home with him.

**FOOTNOTE (asterisked): It should be noted that Kelly asked, "How long did he take in there?" When told, "A half-hour," she said, "Well, that's pretty good, I guess."

Any wonder I love Kelley so?

**FOOTNOTE (asterisked): When he was being carted off in handcuffs, Banana Boy said something like, “Put me back in jail. I can’t fit into society. I’m a sick, sick bastard.” Nothing like a self-aware pervert to renew your faith in humanity.

**FOOTNOTE (asterisked): Except to say (you didn’t really think I was letting that go wholesale, did you?) The Boy has been anguished ever since about his behaviour. He's been stalking Kelley to find out how he can make it right with me. Ah, the power of Marinhood.